I was twenty and although I had had relationships before this was my first soul-cracking-crazy-making-in-LOVE love. And it was over.

I was heart broken, but I realised I was also someone that I didn’t particularly like, or know any more. I hurt, but I had also hurt. Badly. Deeply. Irreparably.

It took a long time to heal from that relationship, in part because at the time my young heart was new to attempting to keep the world together on the outside, whilst taking a long hard look at myself on the inside.

I realised that sometimes you have to hit two extremes to work out where your centre is. That balance is not about staying on the straight and narrow but a see-saw of exchange between you, and the outside world. And sometimes, you and the inside world too.

I learnt to be careful with my own heart, but also to be careful with someone else’s and the things that you forget can be kept and clung to in their memory, if maybe forgotten in yours.

I learnt that no matter how thin you slice it, there are always two sides, and for all you can throw out, it can be thrown back in equal measure.

Love is love. Forgiveness is forgiveness. No matter what skirt you dress it up in.

Scar tissue isn’t there to be buried but to be celebrated. When the light catches it by chance and a silver sliver is just caught out of the corner of your eye, cheer it on. Send out the love and the luck and the wishes, a thousand times over. It is a lesson.

I learnt acceptance and in the glorious sadness of it all, I became someone so much stronger, and yet softer, than before.

It changed me forever and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

TAKE CARE. TAKE COURAGE.

x